The second volume is an attempt to reproduce the Tales of Chaucer in modern prose after the manner of Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespeare.' This is a far more arduous undertaking. Mr. Clarke tells us that he has endeavoured to render the poetry in as easy prose as he could, without at the same time destroying the poetical description and strong natural expressions of the author. Some of the long discussions are omitted, as of course is all that is offensive in coarse expression or allusion. The task has been difficult. 'I was,' Mr. Clarke says, 'to be at one and the same time modernly antique, prosaically poetic, and comprehensively concise.' That he has succeeded in so large a degree is very high merit. We trust his little volume will be widely read.
THEOLOGY AND PHILOLOGY.
The Origin, and Development of Religious Belief. By S. Baring-Gould, M.A. Part II.—Christianity. Rivingtons.
We have already called the attention of our readers to the first part of this remarkable work, in which the writer, taking the standpoint of positive science and the facts of human nature, endeavoured to account for the developments of religious belief in all ages and places, and uttered his conviction that they all correspond to some necessity and quality of human nature. He then hazarded the opinion that the true and absolute religion would take account of, and embody, and satisfy, the cravings expressed in the strange worship and religious ideas of all peoples. He has now pursued his inquiry into the positive dicta of Christian theology, and seeks to show that they rest on facts anterior both to the text of Scripture and the very existence of the Divine Society. Revelation, if it exists at all, must take up into itself all the varieties not only of Mosaism or heathenism, but of polytheism, of idolatry, fetishism, and mysticism, because these and many others are facts of human nature, and have had a great part to play in the development and progress of human thought. Christianity, to our author, is true—and by Christianity he appears to mean the whole dogmatic and hierarchical and social edifice of Catholicism, because it contains in itself the utterance of all truths. All other religions and all sects and schism of the one Church, so far as they hold positive truth, hold only what the Church holds; their negations are to his mind 'nothing,' and are destitute, therefore, of all vital power. The Quaker, the Lutheran, the Anglican, the Greek, the Presbyterian, the modern Christian philosopher, not to say the Pagan, the Arian, the Pelagian, the Donatist, grasped severally and forcibly some one truth; perhaps one-half of the antinomy presenting itself in some great synthesis. Let this be granted, and, according to Mr. B. Gould, Catholicism held the same great truth. It may be found embedded in her system, taught with greater explicitness there than by the sectary; but each of these has denied some truth or placitum of Catholicism, and its negation has been nothing, has added nothing to the value of belief as positive truth. Yet with all this, the author falls foul of Rome at a hundred points. The union between the Church and the temporal power is denounced with unmeasured terms; the Papacy is a violation and a 'negation' of the œcumenicity of the Church, and the encyclical of Pius IX. comes in for a series of terrific blows. The Inquisition and the persecuting spirit which arose in Rome under the union of sacred and secular powers, is treated with as sincere a condemnation as is every form of Protestantism. Still further, when the author comes to deal with the evidence for the Incarnation, on which his whole theory turns, he disposes of every vestige of proof which may be supposed to linger in the New Testament in favour of this stupendous mystery of grace, and this 'conciliation of all antinomies.' The chapter on 'The Evidence of the Incarnation' is a feeble rechauffé of the most ultra type of modern scepticism. Miracles and prophecy, the inspiration, authenticity, and genuineness of the Gospels, the evidential value of specific occurrences in the life of Christ, all go to the wall. Much is made of discrepancies and contradictions, of the silence of contemporary historians, and all the rest of it, with which we are so familiar; and our author's conclusion is, that there is no evidence worthy of the name for the chief fact on which the whole of the religious development of Christianity turns. Relinquishing every proof of the divinity of Christ derivable from the New Testament as less than useless, the grounds on which he calls for a belief in the incarnation of God in Christ (who, by the way, need not ever have existed as an historical character at all) are, that 'such a union of divinity and humanity is necessary to me, that my nature may find its complete religious satisfaction;' 'such a dogma alone supplies an adequate basis for morals, establishes the rights of man on a secure foundation, enables man to distinguish between authority and force, conciliates my double nature, rational and sentimental, and my double duties, egoistic and altruistic, and supplies an adequate incentive to progress.'
These several points furnish the matter of several chapters; and while it must be observed here that Mr. Baring-Gould's 'negations,' as well as those of other sectaries, are 'nothing,' and his condemnations and denials of many positions for which the Catholic Christian would be prepared to die, put him, in spite of himself, among the most extreme left of the Hegelian school, yet his arguments on the worth of the dogma of Incarnation, from his own point of view, deserve serious consideration. After his numerous indications of a negative criticism and spirit as hardy and audacious as could be well imagined, he sets to work with a will, to blaspheme Protestantism as the negation of moral truths. His monstrous perversions of Luther's and Calvin's position merit severe castigation. Thus, 'Calvin denied free-will, and therefore denied duty.' Can he have read the 'Institutes?' The statement 'that Reformers denied the holiness of God,' with Jewel's 'Apology,' or any of the Protestant symbols in his hand, is too flagrant a violation of common fairness. The charge in this chapter against Protestants, that they deny or negative the Personal Christ, and in a later chapter, that they have only a dead Christ and not a present Christ to worship or love, comes with a bad grace from one who has thrown away the evidence of the existence or divinity of Christ as an historical fact. He appears to glory in the sacramental system of the Romanist, and assures us that the Protestant sacraments are reduced to two, and these are not baptism and the Lord's Supper, but the 'Ministry' and the 'Bible;' the latter of which, in its sacramental character, he pleasingly describes for his purpose, as just so much 'washed-up rags and black treacle stains,' an euphuism for the printed page, which is the matériel for the communication of such truth and reality as we poor destitute beings possess. We are content. The mighty Word itself, with all its power to kindle life and instruct intelligence, to stir the affections, and discern even the thoughts and intents of the heart, is graciously communicated to us by the printed page, and by the living voice of men charged with the Holy Ghost; and for an actual communication of the living Christ to our true nature, it is on an infinitely higher level than that which can only reach our emotional nature through the medium of our alimentary canal and gastric juices. When our author holds up to heartless Protestants certain acts of special worship which Cardinal Wiseman described so feelingly and poetically, we can hardly refrain from telling him that such Cremorne splendours of religious awe, such blendings of fetishism and wax-candles with the stupendous conception of the ever-present Christ, will have little effect upon those whose intellectual, moral, and sensuous nature have been brought into their due relation with each other, who know the Christ, who love Him and could die for him.
There is much that is worthy of profound consideration in Mr. Baring-Gould's positive assertions with reference to the Incarnation and the Atonement, the dogma of immortality and the Christian sacrifice; but he has a strange habit of putting a few transcendental propositions one after the other, mounting up from a 'positive' basis to something like 'Catholic doctrine,' and then calling his string of dogmas, demonstration. He appears perfectly rabid in his hatred of Protestantism and Protestants, in his dislike of the doctrine of the Atonement, as expounded in every phase of evangelical Christianity; and he never wearies of accusing Protestants of worshipping a dead Christ, because they cannot, after his Hegelian fashion, accept the Tridentine dogma of transubstantiation and eucharistic sacrifice. With all his rapturous admiration of the Church and denunciation of Protestants, it is sufficiently amusing to find him perpetually—when he wants to give high utterance to his most enthusiastic dream—driven to quote the poetry of Sectaries; and once he is so far left to himself as actually to make that heretic, Isaac Watts, do him some service, and say for him one of his sweetest thoughts. After all said and done, we find him still outside the Roman Church, and the next thing we may hear is, that his interesting, eloquent, and original book is placed in the 'Index.' There is surely scarcely a position of high importance adopted by him which would not be repudiated by a Catholic theologian.
The Athanasian Creed, and its usage in the English Church: an Investigation, as to the General Object of the Creed, and the Growth of prevailing Misconceptions concerning it. A Letter to Very Rev. W. F. Hook, D.D., from C. A. Swainson, D.D. Rivingtons.
This letter is extremely interesting, coming, as it does, on the morrow after the publication of the Report of the Ritual Commissioners, and following the courageous articles of Dean Stanley and Professor Maurice in the Contemporary Review, and the long discussion of the subject in the Guardian. Dr. Swainson is well entitled, by his prolonged studies in this department of ecclesiastical literature, to be heard in defence of the symbol of Athanasius. The upshot of his argument is, that it is a 'hymn,' and not a 'creed.' Here he does but re-echo the language of Dr. J. H. Newman, Mr. Maurice, and others. He conceives, however, that he has proved that it was in the first instance used to prepare candidates for baptism, and that the damnatory clauses do not belong to it in essence, and have not the same authenticity or value as the exposition given in it of the Catholic faith; that their meaning is not intended to cover every individual clause of the exposition, but to refer to the Catholic faith as a whole; that they merely assert the grand distinction which faith makes between those that are being saved and those that are perishing for ever in the darkness of unbelief; that the inaccuracies of the English translation are due to the influence of the Greek translation of Bryling, and to the obscurity introduced by Luther's version of it into German; that it ought to be 'sung,' in a true translation, as an addition to the psalmody, and not in place of the Apostles' Creed; that as 'the articles were never intended originally to be made a test to be subscribed or enlarged from that point of view,' the reference to the Athanasian Creed in the Articles does not bind us to believe that every clause in it is agreeable to the word of God, any more than a multitude of other propositions in the Articles, about which it would be absurd to make a similar assertion. These various refinements will not avail to reconcile the Anglican clergy to continue much longer the use of a formulary which, though certain portions of it may, by antiquarian scholars, be severed in thought from the rest, does yet assume to the majority of those that are called to 'sing' or 'say' it, the appearance of a homogeneous whole. Dr. Newman's description of it as a war-song of the Church, is unquestionably true; if so, it does condemn, in the language of triumphant dogmatism, the opinions of Arian, Sabellian, and Apollinarian, as well as those who repudiate the Double Procession of the Holy Spirit; and it declares that, without doubt, those who hold such opinions shall perish for ever. Scarcely one in a thousand of the Anglican clergy can believe in the obvious literal interpretation of the symbol as a whole.
The History and Literature of the Israelites, according to the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. By C. de Rothschild and A. de Rothschild. Two vols. Longmans, Green and Co.